How Mark Zuckerberg rebuilt Facebook around Llama AI
How AI made Mark Zuckerberg popular again in Silicon Valley
AI isn't hitting a wall, it's just getting too smart for benchmarks, says Anthropic
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How Mark Zuckerberg rebuilt Facebook around Llama AI
It was the summer of 2023, and the question at hand was whether to release a Llama into the wild.
The Llama in question wasn’t an animal: Llama 2 was the follow-up release of Meta’s generative AI model—a would-be challenger to OpenAI’s GPT-4. The first Llama had come out a few months earlier. It had originally been intended only for researchers, but after it leaked online, it caught on with developers, who loved that it was free—unlike the large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—as well as state-of-the-art. Also unlike those rivals, it was open source, which meant researchers, developers, and other users could access the underlying code and its “weights” (which determine how the model processes information) to use, modify, or improve it.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, and Joelle Pineau, VP of AI research and head of Meta’s FAIR (Fundamental AI Research) team, wanted to give Llama 2 a wide open-source release. They felt strongly that open-sourcing Llama 2 would enable the model to become more powerful more quickly, at a lower cost. It could help the company catch up in a generative AI race in which it was seen as lagging badly behind its rivals. But there were also weighty reasons not to take that path. Once customers got accustomed to a free product, how could you ever monetize it?
But at the same time, LeCun says, he and other Meta leaders were taken aback by the sheer demand for the leaked Llama model from researchers and developers. These would-be users wanted the flexibility and control that would come with open access to a profoundly powerful LLM. "We got incoming requests from people who said, ‘You have to open-source that stuff. It’s so valuable that you could create an entire industry, like a new internet.'” - Yann Lecun, describing reactions to the 2023 leak of Llama.
It would fall to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and controlling shareholder, to break the deadlock. Zuckerberg has long touted open-source technology (Facebook itself was built on open-source software)….
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How AI made Mark Zuckerberg popular again in Silicon Valley
After some trying years during which Mr. Zuckerberg could do little right, many developers and technologists have embraced the Meta chief as their champion of “open-source” artificial intelligence. When Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, announced last year that his company would release an artificial intelligence system, Jeffrey Emanuel had reservations.
Mr. Emanuel, a part-time hacker and full-time A.I. enthusiast, had tinkered with “closed” A.I. models, including OpenAI’s, meaning the systems’ underlying code could not be accessed or modified. When Mr. Zuckerberg introduced Meta’s A.I. system by invitation only to a handful of academics, Mr. Emanuel was concerned that the technology would remain limited to just a small circle of people. But in a release last summer of an updated A.I. system, Mr. Zuckerberg made the code “open source” so that it could be freely copied, modified and reused by anyone.
Mr. Emanuel, the founder of the blockchain start-up Pastel Network, was sold. He said he appreciated that Meta’s A.I. system was powerful and easy to use. Most of all, he loved how Mr. Zuckerberg was espousing the hacker code of making the technology freely available — largely the opposite of what Google, OpenAI and Microsoft have done. “We have this champion in Zuckerberg,” Mr. Emanuel, 42, said. “Thank God we have someone to protect the open-source ethos from these other big companies.”
Mr. Zuckerberg has become the highest-profile technology executive to support and promote the open-source model for A.I. That has put the 40-year-old billionaire squarely on one end of a divisive debate over whether the potentially world-changing technology is too dangerous to be made available to any coder who wants it. Microsoft, OpenAI and Google have more of a closed A.I. strategy to guard their tech, out of what they say is an abundance of caution. But Mr. Zuckerberg has loudly stood behind how the technology should be open to all.
“This technology is so important, and the opportunities are so great, that we should open source and make it as widely available as we responsibly can, so that way everyone can benefit,” he said in an Instagram video in January. That stance has turned Mr. Zuckerberg into the unlikely man of the hour in many Silicon Valley developer communities, prompting talk of a “glow-up” and a kind of “Zuckaissance.”.…
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AI isn't hitting a wall, it's just getting too smart for benchmarks, says Anthropic
As their self-correction and self-reasoning improve, the latest LLMs find new capabilities at a rate that makes it harder to measure everything they can do. Large language models and other forms of generative artificial intelligence are improving steadily at "self-correction," opening up the possibilities for new kinds of work they can do, including "agentic AI," according to the vice president of Anthropic, a leading vendor of AI models.
"It's getting very good at self-correction, self-reasoning," said Michael Gerstenhaber, head of API technologies at Anthropic, which makes the Claude family of LLMs that compete with OpenAI's GPT. "Every couple of months we've come out with a new model that has extended what LLMs can do," said Gerstenhaber during an interview Wednesday in New York with Bloomberg Intelligence's Anurag Rana. "The most interesting thing about this industry is that new use cases are unlocked with every model revision."
The most recent models include task planning, such as how to carry out tasks on a computer as a person would; for example, ordering pizza online. "Planning interstitial steps is something that wasn't possible yesterday that is possible today," said Gerstenhaber of such step-by-step task completion….
Enjoy! SBalley Team